The protocol in a nutshell is as follows:

• An feed URL (a “topic”) declares its Hub server(s) in its Atom or RSS XML file, via <link rel=”hub” …>. The hub(s) can be run by the publisher of the feed, or can be a community hub that anybody can use. (Atom and RssFeeds are supported)

• A subscriber (a server that’s interested in a topic), initially fetches the Atom URL as normal. If the Atom file declares its hubs, the subscriber can then avoid lame, repeated polling of the URL and can instead register with the feed’s hub(s) and subscribe to updates.

• The subscriber subscribes to the Topic URL from the Topic URL’s declared Hub(s).

• When the Publisher next updates the Topic URL, the publisher software pings the Hub(s) saying that there’s an update.

• The hub efficiently fetches the published feed and multicasts the new/changed content out to all registered subscribers.

The protocol is decentralized and free. No company is at the center of this controlling it. Anybody can run a hub, or anybody can ping (publish) or subscribe using open hubs.

To bootstrap this, we’ve provided an open source reference implementation of the hub (the hard part of the protocol) that runs on Google App Engine, and is open for anybody to use.

Plugins

• Wordpress

photo credit: notsogood [in malaysia nov18-dec4th]

Remember that new pages usually take one week or more to get indexed by search engines, so that by the time your single post page gets indexed the post will already be out of the homepage, and it will be displayed as an excerpt, removing the duplicate content issue.

Apart from SEO benefits this change might also improve the user experience. Displaying only post excerpts on the subsequent pages will make it easier for readers to scan them quickly while searching for the post that they are looking for.

Our journey begins by defining some of the key contributing factors that Google uses to determine a website’s and webpage’s ranking within its results. These factors range from keyword use to manipulating internal and external links and the list goes on. To get you started, they have listed the top twenty factors that you should focus on in order to help get your website that little bit closer to the top of the search engine results listings.

SEO is a very sensible business and there are many ways which swear success, but most of them are pain for search engines. In this tutorial we will use headlines for reaching better results in search engines by using the CSS text indent technology. There is also an german article about image replacement by using CSS.

First, take a look into the source code of Knowtebook and you will find in the beginning lines beneath the body tag following code:

<div id="header">

<h1> <a href=http://www.knowtebook.com/">
Knowtebook - Knowtebook is a social open source community
dedicated to web-developers and designers.</a
</h1>

</div>

The lines of code contains an H1 header-element with the title and the description of Knowtebook. The header is put into a div tag. So what’s so special about it? Well, try to find it on the front page!

Most techniques describe image-replacment tricks which are complicated or are very known by search engines and can lead to be kicked out of their index, because of cheating with content. Knowtebook uses the “text-intend” CSS technology shown below:

#header h1{
margin-top:10px;
margin-left: 0px;
background: url(i/logo-web-300px.gif) no-repeat;
float: left;
text-indent: -9999px
}

The CSS code will take your headline and will place it outside of the screen, but will show a logo instead. This way you can use your H1 elements for your search engine optimation and your nice logo. We have had nice experiences with this technology - what are yours? Please give us your feedback below.

<script src=”http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

Of course, it makes sense that they would - it’s beneficial to them that you send visitors through to their site, and beneficial to you that those visitors end up digging your article. But what if you want to go one step further and display a digg count for a whole range of articles?

The tool will scan the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and flag possible problem areas. This can greatly ease your seo efforts.